


Electric pinecone

by faceofstone



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Connections, F/F, Gen, Vignette, canon-typical ethereal whooshing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28098120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: The material world is surrounded by layers of intangible connections, all as strange and absurd as the life down below. Observe: a phone call, an echo, a recording and a dream.
Relationships: Constance Talbot & Tamara "Tammy" Preston, Diane Evans/Constance Talbot, Lil the Dancer & Diane Evans, Lucy Moran & Lil the Dancer
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2020





	Electric pinecone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Sank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Sank/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!!!

**1\. a phone call**

Hawk walks into the sheriff’s station. Lucy, phone in hand, is very still. The electrical exchange – not quite words, it doesn’t seem – that is taking place inside the receiver holds every fiber of her attention, eyes blank, barely blinking. Hawk waves at her and shrugs as she does not answer. Classic Lucy.

The speakerphone in the conference room is on, one wonders why they even put an off switch on those things. The call, it turns out, consists of a crackling of paper, bare feet stomping on the ground, water (running?), unseen movements slicing through the air, on and on in a mute dance.

Eventually, Harry joins him. Lucy’s singsong voice follows him into the room: “Sheriff, there is a message for Agent Cooper! It’s from the Bureau! It...” she stops there for a moment, thinking, remembering, translating, “...Gordon Cole sends a message to ignore the owls, even the ones that are very small. It’s all swans, that’s what she said. Agent Cooper needs to focus on the swans. I thought it sounded very urgent. But the secretary they have for these messages that cannot be said out loud was very nice. ...oh, I wonder what will happen now that I’ve said it. I don’t feel any different. But maybe something else is?”

**2\. a recording**

The year is 1995 and there is a message on Lil’s voicemail. “Get out. Fast.” is all it says, in Diane’s low, smoky, barking tone after Lil hasn’t heard from her in two weeks, neither at work nor for their dinners. She is glad to hear her voice. Strange code, though. Following protocol, Lil considers the symbolic value of exits, connected ontological paradoxes, the Labyrinth as quintessential man-made structure that prevents such things, all its dead ends, the ontological nature of its bricks; the perception of velocity; she calculates the root of the precise time the message was recorded and the numerical value of each letter across eleven tables in half a dozen systems, looking for guidance, parallels, obfuscated substitutions.

She is still sitting at her desk by the time the storm hits.

**3\. a dream**

All the tales she heard, all the fragments that seeped through the cracks of bulky black redactions and through Albert’s reticence when it came to explaining what it was, exactly, that their team did, spoke of dream-spaces and dream-messages. Constance is, therefore, not surprised to see Diane again in her dreams, so soon after they left. Likewise unsurprising is the fact that Diane is still the queen of any room she graces with her presence, and in dreams, this truth is absolute. Constance only wishes she hadn’t picked a morgue as her kingdom. She pledges her loyalty by carving her up. Better than nothing. Better than letting her go.

She dictates her initial observations.

“Some more oomph, girl. What is this, coroner kindergarten?” says Diane’s disembodied voice through the recorder, as her corpse lays still on the slate.

Constance repeats her initial observations, plus two morbid jokes.

“Now we're getting somewhere. B for effort.”

“Thanks.”

Cause of death, she concludes: filled with red velvet. Constance extracts a skein’s worth of fabric out of her body, one continuous strip like intestines, or a magician’s endless handkerchiefs. In the end that’s all out, and Diane’s body empty. Constance blinks. The scene shifts. She is sitting on the slate now, weighted down by the velvet, while Diane, freed from it, is standing to her left, coming in closer with an enigmatic smile. Her presence fills the room.

“You know, I’m really regretting not taking lucid dreaming classes now. If you don’t mind me saying this, right now I would-”

Diane pulls her chin up with a caress and kisses her, sharing a secret from lips to lips. No need for lucid dreaming after all.

But then she leans against Constance’s ear, as if they were in a movie, or a scene that has played out a hundred times, and whispers: “Albert killed me.”

**4\. an echo**

There is a new secretary at the Buckhorn station. She must have been here one week yet it feels like she has been sitting at the reception’s desk since before there was a roof on it, memories of her predecessor fading like mist in the sun. They call her donut. They have always called her donut. All blonde curls and curly words, let her talk for five minutes and you’ll go from fingertips pruning under the shower to stick driving to the shape of a log in the park before – if ever – she floats back down to the point. Makes you want to spend five minutes yourself trying to describe her, knowing you will fail because there’s a center to that donut that remains elusive.

Constance gives it the old college try, that night, as she chats with the Preston girl, whose idea of taking a break from the wretched hive of hearsay and gossip she’s stuck in is, apparently, hearing all about the dirty laundry of an identical podunk town just a bit to the south.

Now, Tammy doesn’t talk much. She is like a shy cat that way, observing from the sidelines, taking it all in. When she does speak, she does not hesitate. It is strange, then, that her chat window shows her typing for several seconds before committing to a single sentence:

“Do you think sometimes the nice things can reverberate too?”

Any context for that question sounds locked under six layers of clearance, especially that 'too', which implies all other manners of things echoing through this world and maybe others. Constance can only reply with all the honesty her life allows her:

“Sometimes I think maybe they do?”


End file.
